To pin the marginalization of Christianity in American culture on the behavior of Christians is to make two assumptions: that Christians had earned their earlier credibility through good behavior (at least in relative terms) and that Christians then lost that credibility because of bad behavior. In Part I, I question the second assumption, but the first is just as suspect.
Did Christians owe their prior dominion over American culture to good behavior? It strikes me as highly unlikely. The most straightforward, self-evident reason Christians have enjoyed so much power in America until recently is that America was founded by devout Christians and their fellow travelers. As the natives were virtually annihilated by disease, war and displacement, our founders had an essentially blank slate on which to a heavily Christian and specifically Protestant culture. Christian legitimacy in the culture was initially maintained not by good behavior but by Christians refusing to cede control of their cultural institutions to the rivals that had driven them from the Old World.
Though battered by the later waves of European secularism, first from Voltaire and the Enlightenment secularists and then from Darwin and Marx and the materialists, Christians remained the governing force in American culture. The peak of America's power in the immediate post-war period of the 1940s and 1950s coincided with a muscular reaffirmation of our Christian identity. In God We Trust was enshrined as the national motto. "Under God" was affixed to the Pledge of Allegiance. The most lucrative intellectual property of that era was not the Marvel universe or Star Wars but the Bible and its literary spin-offs. Samson and Delilah, Quo Vadis, The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur - these were the biggest box office smashes of the era.
The gap between Christian behavior then and now isn't even close to explaining the catastrophic loss of Christian stature in American culture. Christians could not blow so much credibility so quickly by their own hand. The culpable party was not huckster televangelists, but a third wave of European secularism that finally succeeded in taking from Christianity what it had refused to cede to Voltaire, Darwin and Marx: control of our cultural institutions.
This third wave is comprised of so many causes and -isms that it has eluded consistent labeling, but has been most accurately described as cultural Marxism. While it lacks a common manifesto with explicitly spelled-out doctrines, the last 50 years have shown it to be a real, cohesive and implacably hostile rival to Christianity.
It is not an anonymous, impersonal movement. It was spearheaded by an alliance of post-Christian American coastal elites and European, predominantly Jewish or atheist, intellectuals and artists. They enjoyed their most important cultural victories in academia and mass media. Their most consequential win was in Hollywood, where men like Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder used their stature as creative giants to drive the previously invincible Christian censors out of the industry in the space of ten years. This unleashed a tidal wave of overt media attacks on Christianity and associated social mores from men like Mike Nichols and Stanley Kubrick. This media revolution coincided with the Sexual Revolution breaking out on college campuses and urban environments ignited by academics like Alfred Kinsey and writers like Helen Gurley Brown.
This movement was not created in response to Christian hypocrisy or bad behavior. It predated the rise of televangelism and the Moral Majority and it remained after their collapse. It won't be deterred by better Christian witnesses, at least not at the atomized, random act of kindness level that Cooke seems to favor. Indeed, it benefits from (and generally encourages) any approach that cedes any Christian claim to cultural authority.
The Religious Right drew so much fire from the cultural Marxists not because of their hypocrisy, but because they were reasserting Christian cultural authority. Their efforts weren't helped by the humiliating examples of Bakker and Swaggart, but theirs was a failure of tactics, not ethics. A televangelist-led direct assault on the media-fortified high ground was doomed to failure - another Charge of the Light Brigade.
Though the tactics need to change if Christians are to increase their influence on the culture, the high ground should remain the same. The mistake Cooke and the self-critics make is to accept the moral high ground as the cultural high ground. A community of loving Christians shining out like a city on a hill is and always been the fundamental objective of the church, but temporal cultural influence was not just a fleeting obsession of the Religious Right. It is a precious inheritance of Western civilization in general and the separatist American colonists in particular. The American City Upon a Hill sought to be a light to the world and to safeguard the cultural mechanisms that had been used to stifle and extinguish it.
The American City Upon a Hill did not fall from grace, it was conquered by the same forces its founders sought to escape. Improving the percentages of church attendance, prayer, tithing and Bible reading are worthy efforts in and of themselves. If and when the culture war is lost for good, they may even be the only way forward. But if we are looking for a way back to a Christian culture, the road ahead of us is a long march back through the institutions that we lost.
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